Apple Terminates Safari Seed Program

coolmacdude writes "This morning Safari beta v67 was leaked to the Internet. Because this is the third time it has happened (v62 and v64 were leaked), Apple has apparantly had enough and decided to terminate the seed program that provided unreleased beta verisons to selected developers. In a email sent to all developers and posted on Mike Wendland's blog, Apple says: 'Due to Safari 67 postings to the internet, we have closed the Safari Seed project. We know that the majority of you are not responsible for the leaks to the internet, and we sincerely appreciate your feedback, time and effort with this project.'"

Comments

Too bad

[Blaine Hilton]

Thats too bad that a few had to ruin it for everyone else. Giving out software like that is a privage, not your God given right. People should respect Apple's wishes and wait until the full release, but no. Now its too late.

Re:License

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're not distributing it they don't have to release the code.

License Irrelevant

[Eravau]

Part of the core rendering is based on Konqueror and is open source (and they do release the enhancements they make to that part back to the community). Everything else that is wrapped around it is not open source. So they have no requirement to let everybody see every little change they make there...and won't.

Re:License

[frankie]

This is not violating any kind of license, like GPL? After all, Safari is Konqueror based.

Safari's back-end (parser, script engine, etc) is based on KHTML, and that code is available here. Safari's front-end (lickability, bookmarking, etc) remains proprietary, and that is allowed by LGPL.

you don't want to be that bleeding edge

[RalphBNumbers]

They're pulling to the 1.3 mozilla trunk for the version of geko they embed in camino right now, and they introduced a whole slew of bugs when they did so. You might want to stick to the .7 release for a month or so unless you're a real masochist.

I used to use the Chimera nightly builds almost exclusively, but these days I stick to the .7 release or safari, and just check the nightlies when something I'm interested in gets mentioned on bugzilla.

Re:So what?

[tulare]

" I'd like to play with their unix too, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a whole new computer to do it."

If it's just the Unix you want to play with, and don't give a hoot about the windowmanager, you can.

Re:So what?

[iso]

If you don't like Apple, that's all well and good, but why then do you feel the need to post or even click on an Apple story? I suppose you just couldn't let an Apple story go by without adding your insults. It's called trolling, and we don't need any more of it. Your opinion is valid, but posting this in an Apple story is just childish and counter-productive. Grow up, please.

- j

Re:Why not just open the beta to everyone?

[evand]

As far as I know, Apple has released all of the improvements to the GPL'd code that they've released. The code they've written from scratch, they're keeping closed, as is their right.

Re:Um, why not just fix the problem?

[spanky1]

Microsoft did exactly this during the Windows 2000 betas. When you'd download an ISO, the special download app would inject your obfuscated IP address and beta ID into the header. Some beta tester discovered this and was able to decode the obfuscation. MS wasn't too happy when this tester reported it to the beta newsgroup. Once people found out about it, it was trivial to remove or alter the injected information.

Reason for Private Seeds.

[itistoday]

I tested v67 out and I think there was a reason Apple didn't want it out: Bugs. This thing has so many bugs... it freezes, you can't click/select anything sometimes (but you can still load pages), among other things...

So perhaps they simply didn't want to give a bad impression out, and don't want to be berraged by a million emails all pointing bugs out that they are most definitely aware of.

Can't

[TheInternet]

Why not publicly release nightly betas, so users can post feedback on development as with BugZilla?

Quality expectations are different for Apple than from many other developers. I suspect this is at least part of the reason. Not to mention all the journalists that would descend upon such a thing to pick apart every release.

Users don't expect the nightlies to be perfect

Normal users don't, Mac users do. They take it personally if there's a bug in a piece of software -- like Apple is after them specifically.

- Scott

v65 and v66 leaked out too

[giaguara]

Not only the v62, 64 and 67 leaked out.
I saw v65 too.

Re:Must be LGPL

[dfaure]

KHTML is LGPL indeed.

Re:LGPL is viral

[Phroggy]

Anything that is statically linked to LGPL code has to have a compatible distribution license. Idiots like you aren't allowed to stop the distribution of binaries generated from LGPL code. The same applies to any dynamically linked binaries that are packaged atomically. Just so it's clear, I mean atomically in the sense of indivisible, not some stupid mutation nonsense such as produced you.

You're either trolling, or you're simply ignorant. The restrictions you describe apply to GPL code, not LGPL. This is precisely why the LGPL exists. From the text of the LGPL:

When a program is linked with a library, whether statically or using a shared library, the combination of the two is legally speaking a combined work, a derivative of the original library. The ordinary General Public License therefore permits such linking only if the entire combination fits its criteria of freedom. The Lesser General Public License permits more lax criteria for linking other code with the library.